Effort turns information into skill and experience into meaning.

The distinction that matters is between effort that merely delays you and effort that develops you.

In a world where things are too easy, we have to be intentional about keeping difficulty alive.

I loved Simon and Garfunkel as a teenager (still do). But feeding that love was no easy matter. Growing up in Bangladesh, it took serious acts of devotion to find ways of listening to their songs. You had to find someone who owned a cassette tape or make friends with the owner of the right shop, or wait for a friend to bring one back from abroad. And when you finally got your hands on something, you listened to it over and over, because that tape was all you had.

It’s much easier to find music nowadays. The friction has been reduced to virtually nothing. I don’t even have to go to the trouble of typing anything into Spotify; I can just speak into my phone and Siri does the rest. And this is true of much more than music. Really, it’s about every domain where effort used to be the price of experience, where friction was the cost of learning. That price, that cost, has virtually disappeared.

Think about how easy it is today to find new recipes or learn new cooking techniques; on a completely different scale, think of how easy it is to “meet” and judge potential romantic partners. You don’t even have to get out of bed. You just have to look at your phone and swipe this way and that.

Some of this is definitely progress. But let’s be careful, too. Sometimes, it’s important to pay a price for getting things.

Why Paying the Price Matters

We tend to think of effort as a cost, the unpleasant thing we endure to get what we want. This is true, but it’s leaving something important out of the picture. In addition........

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